Samsung Series 5 Chromebooks Appear At Dixons

Dixons is likely to be the first UK retailer to stock the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook ahead of Amazon; the DSGi-owned company has both versions of the Chromebook (Arctic White 3G and Wi-Fi) on preorder for £399 and £349 respectively with free delivery.

The Samsung Series 5 Chromebook comes with an Intel Atom N570 processor clocked at 1.66GHz with two cores and 1MB cache, 2GB RAM, 16GB SSD, one VGA and three USB ports, a card reader, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a webcam, a 12.1-inch 1280x800 pixel screen, two speakers, a 75-key keyboard and a 6-cell battery with an estimated battery life of more than eight hours.

Arguably the main highlight of the Chromebook is its OS, Google Chrome OS, which promises a boot-up time under 10 seconds and a number of novel features like hardware encryption that Google hopes will help differentiate Chromebooks from other netbooks on the market.

There's still no trace of the Acer branded Chromebook which was announced at the same time as the Samsung Chromebook last month. Unlike the latter, the Acer model comes with an HDMI port, a slightly smaller screen but with a higher resolution and surprise, surprise, a cheaper price tag.